February 2017
Amy F. Ogata – Industry, Aluminum, and Orfèvrerie in Second Empire France
Amy Ogata will be giving a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Wednesday, February 15 from 12:15 to 1:15 pm, at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Her talk is entitled "Industry, Aluminum, and Orfèvrerie in Second Empire France."
Find out more »Rediscovering Words and Worlds – Arabic Script Collections at Columbia University
There is a substantial collection of "Islamic" manuscripts housed at the university's Rare Book and Manuscripts Library (RBML), as well as in some other affiliated institutions, that are either not catalogued or poorly done so. This threeday workshop will explore the many worlds of the collections, and includes a panel of librarians and paleographers discussing the issues surrounding cataloguing of multilingual collections acquired through several decades, as well as intensive workshops on paleography, codicology, and study of lithographs. The goal of this workshop is to catalyze a longer-term project to catalogue and study these collections at Columbia.
Find out more »Meredith Ray – Early Modern Women and Communities of Science
The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance is pleased to announce the topic of its February meeting; Meredith Ray will speak on "Early Modern Women and Communities of Science."
Find out more »Understanding Material Loss Across Time and Space
Speculative and exploratory in nature, Understanding Material Loss asserts that in a period marked by ecological destruction, but also economic austerity, large scale migration and increasing resource scarcity, it is important that historians work to better understand the ways in which humans have responded to material loss in the past and how such responses have shaped change. Understanding Material Loss asks: how have humans historically responded to material loss and how has this shaped historical processes? The conference will bring together a range of scholars in an effort more to begin to explore and frame a problem, than provide definitive answers.
Find out more »Rethinking Philosophy’s Past, 1300-1800
Distinguished historians and philosophers will share recent scholarship on women and other understudied figures in the history of philosophy to encourage more accurate accounts of philosophy’s past and more inclusive teaching. Sessions rethink standard stories and offer practical ideas about to incorporate understudied figures in our philosophy courses, both historical and non-historical.
Find out more »Symposium in Honor of George Saliba
The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary symposium and reception in honor of Professor George Saliba, on the occasion of his retirement. Scholars of the history of science and the history of Arabic and Islamic thought will present their current research, and celebrate the contributions of Professor Saliba to these fields of scholarship. The symposium will take place on Friday, February 17, in Butler Library, room 523, from…
Find out more »Global Perspectives in Histories of Music Theory
The monochord, an instrument featuring a single stretched string, is perhaps the oldest known musical and scientific instrument. Records of its usage date back to the Sumerians, and it played an important role in the mathematical and musical explorations in Greek and Chinese antiquity. This evening excavates the history of the monochord in a global perspective by drawing together concerns in measurement, classification, and craft across East Asia and Europe. Music theorists Guangming Li, Joon Park, and David Cohen each examine how early philosophers used the monochord to address musical and mathematical problems from the sixth century BCE to the fifteenth century.
Find out more »Courtney Roby – Modeling Embodied Experience in the Peripatetic Mechanica
Courtney Roby discusses the Peripatetic text typically called Mechanica or Mechanical Problems, long attributed to Aristotle.
Find out more »Joseph LeDoux – “Have We Misunderstood Fear and Anxiety?”
Eminent neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (New York University) will speak about his new book Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (Penguin 2015).
Find out more »The John K. Lattimer Lecture – The Marrow of Tragedy: Disease and Diversity in Civil War Medicine
Health care in the U.S. Civil War is often depicted as gruesome, with amputations (sans anesthesia) as the centerpiece of horror. In actuality, hospitals could be sites of healing, although there were significant differences between North and South. In this lecture, Margaret Humphreys highlights the variations among medical loci during the war, an analysis that illustrates the aspects of "good health care" that made a difference in the survival of Civil War patients.
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